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• Good book(s) for MMORPG design & implementation?

  - by mawg

  I am a long time professional C/C++ programmer (mostly embedded systems) and a hobbyist windows & php hacker. Can anyone recommend a book(s) specifically aimed at designing and (hopefully) implementing an MMORPG? I don't need general how to design or how to code books. Maybe a really good generic games book, but I am not interested in 1st person shooters, I want to know what it takes to implement an MMORPG. Good books, maybe also good URLs. Thanks just searching eBay and Amazon threw up a whole slew of books. Amazon's customer reviews give me an idea of how good they are, and the overview tells me what areas they cover

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• Socket server for 2D MMORPG

  - by Alejandro

  I'm starting a 2D browser multiplayer game consisting of a city with many kinds of transports (metro, buses, tunnels), players using those transports and having some interaction between them. I have started the client side in Actionscript, server side in PHP (but now i'm moving to Java) and persistence in MySQL. Which socket server (non commercial) will be preferable, RedDwarf (former DarkStar), Red5, ... ? Those servers are Flash Remoting (AMF) capable ? Those servers manage all the object's game persistence? Then there's no need to create a database ?

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• MMORPG design for time-limited players

  - by Philipp

  I believe that there is a significant market of players who would enjoy the exploration and interaction aspects of MMORPGs, but simply don't have the time for the endless grinding marathons which are part of the average MMORPG. MMORPGs are all about interaction between players. But when different players have different amounts of time to invest into a game, those with less time to spend will soon lack behind their power-leveling friends and won't be able to interact with them anymore. One way to solve this would be to limit the progress a player can achieve per day, so that it simply doesn't make sense to play more than one or two hours a day. But even the busiest casual players sometimes like to spend a whole sunday afternoon playing a video game. Just stopping them after two hours would be really frustrating. It also creates a pressure to use the daily progress limit every day, because otherwise the player would feel like wasting something. This pressure would be detrimental for casual gamers. What else could be done to level the playing field between those players who play 40+ hours a week and those who can't play more than 10?

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• multi-thread in mmorpg server

  - by jean

  For MMORPG, there is a tick function to update every object's state in a map. The function was triggered by a timer in fixed interval. So each map's update can be dispatch to different thread. At other side, server handle player incoming package have its own threads also: I/O threads. Generally, the handler of the corresponding incoming package run in I/O threads. So there is a problem: thread synchronization. I have consider two methods: Synchronize with mutex. I/O thread lock a mutex before execute handler function and map thread lock same mutex before it execute map's update. Execute all handler functions in map's thread, I/O thread only queue the incoming handler and let map thread to pop the queue then call handler function. These two have a disadvantage: delay. For method 1, if the map's tick function is running, then all clients' request need to waiting the lock release. For method 2, if map's tick function is running, all clients' request need to waiting for next tick to be handle. Of course, there is another method: add lock to functions that use data which will be accessed both in I/O thread & map thread. But this is hard to maintain and easy to goes incorrect. It needs carefully check all variables whether or not accessed by both two kinds thread. My problem is: is there better way to do this? Notice that I said map is logic concept means no interactions can happen between two map except transport. I/O thread means thread in 3rd part network lib which used to handle client request.

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• Permanent death in a MUD (think command line MMORPG)

  - by Luke Laupheimer

  I have considered writing a MUD for years, and I have a lot of ideas my friends think are really cool (and that's how I'd hope to get anywhere -- word of mouth). Thing is, there's one thing I have always wanted, that my friends and strangers hated: permanent death. Now, the emotional response I get to this is visceral revulsion, every time. I'm pretty sure I am the only person that wants this, or if I'm not, I'm a tiny minority. Now, the reason I want it is because I want the actions of the players to matter. Unlike a lot of other MUDs, which have a set of static city-states and social institutions etc, I want the things my players do, should I get any, to actually change the situation. And that includes killing people. If you kill someone, you didn't send them to time out, you killed them. What happens when you kill people? They go away. They don't come back in half an hour to smack talk you some more. They're gone. Forever. By making death non-permanent, you make death not matter. It would be similar if a climax to a character's arc is getting a speeding ticket. It cheapens it. Non-permanent death cheapens death. How can I: 1) Convince my players (and random people!) that this is actually a good idea?, or 2) Find some other way to make death and violence matter as much as it does in real life (except within the game, of course) sans character deletion? What alternatives are there out there?

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• MMORPG game balancing

  - by Gary Paluk

  I've seen a couple of examples of some game balancing techniques in books yet they are not comprehensive and not particularly aimed at MMORPGs but I'm looking for practical examples of game balancing techniques for MMORPGs. I am interested to know if anyone has documented the techniques used in popular games with proven success in this area. Ideally, any resource would cover most common types of stats and include layman mathematical models or techniques used to balance game mechanics found in advanced MMORPGs (I know it's a cliché, but WoW style) Any help would be great!

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• I need to sell an almost-complete MMORPG project. How can I do that?

  - by Tomasz

  I need your help. We have to sell MMORPG at an advanced stage. The game has a unique engine, written on the need for the game, graphics, sound, map editor, web site etc. As it happens in the play mmorpg we can develop the characters, monsters. We can fight with other characters or to establish cooperation in solving the challenges. We can fight using own monsters, or throwing their own cards with spells. Unfortunately we have no idea how to promote the game. Ended fund and I think the whole team surrendered. How can I find a buyer? Where can I find him? Thank you for your help.

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• Does an inventory limit in an MMORPG make sense?

  - by Philipp

  I am currently developing a simple 2d MMORPG. My current focus is the inventory system. I am currently wondering if I should implement a limit on what a player character can carry. Either in form of a maximum weight, a limited number of inventory slots, or a combination of both. Almost every MMORPG I ever played limits inventory space. But plausibility aside, is this really necessary from a gameplay point of view? Maybe it would in fact improve the game experience when I just let the players carry as much stuff as they want. tl;dr: What is the game development rationale behind limiting carrying capacity of player characters?

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• What are some best practices for making sure your .NET code will scale well?

  - by billmaya

  Last week I interviewed for a position at a TripleA MMORPG game company here in NE. I didn't get the job but one of the areas that came up during the interview was the about the scalability of the code that you write and how it should be considered early on in the design of your architecture and classes. Sadly to say I've never thought very much about the scalability of the .NET code that I've written (I work with single user desktop and mobile applications and our major concerns are usually with device memory and rates of data transmission). I'm interested in learning more about writing code that scales up well so it can handle a wide range of remote users in a client server environment, specifically MMORPGs. Are there any books, web sites, best practices, etc. that could get me started researching this topic?

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• How can I make an MMORPG appeal to casual players?

  - by Philipp

  I believe that there is a significant market of players who would enjoy the exploration and interaction aspects of MMORPGs, but simply don't have the time for the endless grinding marathons which are part of the average MMORPG. MMORPGs are all about interaction between players. But when different players have different amounts of time to invest into a game, those with less time to spend will soon lack behind their power-leveling friends and won't be able to interact with them anymore. One way to solve this would be to limit the progress a player can achieve per day, so that it simply doesn't make sense to play more than one or two hours a day. But even the busiest casual players sometimes like to spend a whole sunday afternoon playing a video game. Just stopping them after two hours would be really frustrating. It also creates a pressure to use the daily progress limit every day, because otherwise the player would feel like wasting something. This pressure would be detrimental for casual gamers. What else could be done to level the playing field between those players who play 40+ hours a week and those who can't play more than 10?

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• Cross-platform game development: ease of development vs security

  - by alcuadrado

  Hi, I'm a member and contributor of the Argentum Online (AO) community, the first MMORPG from Argentina, which is Free Software; which, although it's not 3D, it's really addictive and has some dozens of thousands of users. Really unluckily AO was developed in Visual Basic (yes, you can laugh) but the former community, so imagine, the code not only sucks, it has zero portability. I'm planning, with some friends to rewrite the client, and as a GNU/Linux frantic, want to do it cross-platform. Some other people is doing the same with the server in Java. So my biggest problem is that we would like to use a rapid development language (like Java, Ruby or Python) but the client would be pretty insecure. Ruby/Python version would have all it's code available, and the Java one would be easily decompilable (yes, we have some crackers in the community) We have consider the option to implement the security module in C/C++ as a dynamic library, but it can be replaced with a custom one, so it's not really secure. We are also considering the option of doing the core application in C++ and the GUI in Ruby/Python. But haven't analysed all it's implications yet. But we really don't want to code the entire game in C/C++ as it doesn't need that much performance (the game is played at 18fps on average) and we want to develop it as fast as possible. So what would you choose in my case? Thank you!

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• C++ AI Design Question

  - by disney

  Hi, I am currently writing a bot for a MMORPG. Though, currently I am stuck at trying to figure out how to nicely implement this. The design problem is related to casting the character spells in the correct order. Here is a simple example to what I need to archieve. It's not related to casting them, but doing it in the correct order. I would know how simply cast them randomly, by checking which skill has not yet been casted, but in right order as being shown in the GUI, not really. note: the skill amount may differ, it's not always 3, maximum 10 though. Charactername < foobar has 3 skills. Skill 1: Name ( random1 ) cooldown ( 1000 ms ) cast duration ( 500 ms ) Skill 2: Name ( random2 ) cooldown ( 1500 ms ) cast duration ( 700 ms ) Skill 3: Name ( random3 ) cooldown ( 2000 ms ) cast duration ( 900 ms ) I don't really know how I could implement this, if anyone has some thoughts, feel free to share. I do know that most of the people don't like the idea of cheating in games, I don't like it either, nor I am actually playing the game, but its an interesting field for me. Thank you.

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• How should I handle persistence in a Java MUD? OptimisticLockException handling

  - by Chase

  I'm re-implementing a old BBS MUD game in Java with permission from the original developers. Currently I'm using Java EE 6 with EJB Session facades for the game logic and JPA for the persistence. A big reason I picked session beans is JTA. I'm more experienced with web apps in which if you get an OptimisticLockException you just catch it and tell the user their data is stale and they need to re-apply/re-submit. Responding with "try again" all the time in a multi-user game would make for a horrible experience. Given that I'd expect several people to be targeting a single monster during a fight I think the chance of an OptimisticLockException would be high. My view code, the part presenting a telnet CLI, is the EJB client. Should I be catching the PersistenceExceptions and TransactionRolledbackLocalExceptions and just retrying? How do you decide when to stop? Should I switch to pessimistic locking? Is persisting after every user command overkill? Should I be loading the entire world in RAM and dumping the state every couple of minutes? Do I make my session facade a EJB 3.1 singleton which would function as a choke point and therefore eliminating the need to do any type of JPA locking? EJB 3.1 singletons function as a multiple reader/single writer design (you annotate the methods as readers and writers). Basically, what is the best design and java persistence API for highly concurrent data changes in an application where it is not acceptable to present resubmit/retry prompts to the user?

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• Code Own Socket Server or Use Red5/ElectroServer on Amazon EC2?

  - by Travis

  I've been thinking for a long time about working on a multiplayer game in Flash. I need updates frequently enough that ajax requests won't work so I need to use a socket server. The system will eventually have enough objects/players that I would consider it an MMO. I would like to set up a scalable system on Amazon's EC2. (Which probably effects my choice of server) This architecture would hopefully allow the game to grow without many changes over time. (Using a domain decomposition technique or something similar) Heres my internal debate: Should I a. Code my own socket server in C++ or Java? b. Use the free and open source Red5 socket server for Flash? or c. Pay the licensing fees and go for Electroserver? I consider myself a decent developer, but am at an impasse as to what road to go down. I'm not sure if I, could develop/would need, the features of one of the prepackaged socket servers. I'm also not sure if the prepackaged servers would work well in an Amazon EC2 environment and take full advantage of its features. Any help or guidance would be greatly appreciated.

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• Artificial Intelligence in online game using Google App Engine

  - by Hortinstein

  I am currently in the planning stages of a game for google app engine, but cannot wrap my head around how I am going to handle AI. I intend to have persistant NPCs that will move about the map, but short of writing a program that generates the same XML requests I use to control player actions, than run it on another server I am stuck on how to do it. I have looked at the Task Queue feature, but due to long running processes not being an option on the App engine, I am a little stuck. I intend to run multiple server instances with 200+ persistant NPC entities that I will need to update. Most action is slowly roaming around based on player movements/concentrations, and attacking close range players...(you can probably guess the type of game im developing)

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• What technology should I use to write my game?

  - by Alon

  I have a great idea for a 3D network game, and I've concluded that it is possible to write it in Java as an applet which will live under the web browser, just like a full software in C++. And it will look and feel the same. The main advantage of Java on C++ is that with Java you can play without downloading any software. I have already thought about the download of the graphics, sound, etc but I found a solution for it. RuneScape just proves that it is possible. So my first question is, should my game live on a web browser or on the operating system? I think that in a web browser it is much more portable, although you need install Java and stuff. But the fact is, that most MMO games are currently not in the web. If you suggest in a software so please suggest a language either - C++ or something more productive like Python or C#? So after choosing a language, I need a graphics solution. Should I write directly with OpenGL/DirectX or use a game engine? What game engine should I use? Ogre? jMonkeyEngine? What's your opinion? Thank you! P.S: Please don't use answers like "Use what you know".

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• Online Game programming in Google App Engine: AI

  - by Hortinstein

  I am currently in the planning stages of a game for google app engine, but cannot wrap my head around how I am going to handle AI. I intend to have persistant NPCs that will move about the map, but short of writing a program that generates the same XML requests I use to control player actions, than run it on another server I am stuck on how to do it. I have looked at the Task Queue feature, but due to long running processes not being an option on the App engine, I am a little stuck. I intend to run multiple server instances with 200+ persistant NPC entities that I will need to update. Most action is slowly roaming around based on player movements/concentrations, and attacking close range players(you can probably guess the type of game im developing)

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• In what kind of variable type is the player position stored on a MMORPG such as WoW?

  - by jokoon

  I even heard J. Carmack quickly talk about it... How a software can track a player's position so accurately, being on a such huge world, without loading between zones, and on a multiplayer scale ? How is the data formatted when it passes through the netcode ? I can understand how vertices are stored into the graphic card's memory, but when it comes to synchronize the multiplayer, I can't imagine what is best.

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• MMORPG Server architecture: How to handle player input (messages/packets) while the server has to update many other things at the same time?

  - by Renann

  Yes, the question is is very difficult. This is more or less like what I'm thinking up to now: while(true) { if (hasMessage) { handleTheMessage(); } } But while I'm receiving the player's input, I also have objects that need to be updated or, of course, monsters walking (which need to have their locations updated on the game client everytime), among other things. What should I do? Make a thread to handle things that can't be stopped no matter what? Code an "else" in the infinity loop where I update the other things when I don't have player's input to handle? Or even: should I only update the things that at least one player can see? These are just suggestions... I'm really confused about it. If there's a book that covers these things, I'd like to know. It's not that important, but I'm using the Lidgren lib, C# and XNA to code both server and client. Thanks in advance.

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• Silverlight Cream for March 08, 2010 -- #809

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Michael Washington, Tim Greenfield, Bobby Diaz(-2-), Glenn Block(-2-), Nikhil Kothari, Jianqiang Bao(-2-), and Christopher Bennage. Shoutouts: Adam Kinney announced a Big update for the Project Rosetta site today Arpit Gupta has opened a new blog with a great logo: I think therefore I am dangerous :) From SilverlightCream.com: DotNetNuke Silverlight Traffic Module If it's DNN and Silverlight, it has to be my buddy Michael Washington :) ... Michael has combined those stunning gauges you've seen with website traffic... just too cool!... grab the code and display yours too! Cool demonstration of Silverlight VideoBrush This is a no-code post by Tim Greenfield, but I like the UX on this Jigsaw Puzzle page... and you can make your own. Introducing the Earthquake Locator – A Bing Maps Silverlight Application, part 1 Bobby Diaz has an informative post up on combining earthquake data with BingMaps in Silverlight 3... check it out, the grab the recently posted Live Demo and Source Code Adding Volcanos and Options - Earthquake Locator, part 2 Bobby Diaz also added volcanic activity to his earthquake BinMaps app, and updated the downloadable code and live demo. Building Hello MEF – Part IV – DeploymentCatalog Glenn Block posted a pair of MEF posts yesterday... made me think I missed one :) .. the first one is about the DeploymentCatalog. Note he is going to be using the CodePlex bits in his posts. Building HelloMEF – Part V – Refactoring to ViewModel Glenn Block's part V is about MEF and MVVM -- no, really! ... he is refactoring MVVM into the app with a nod to Josh Smith and Laurent Bugnion... get your head around this... The Case for ViewModel Nikhil Kothari has a post up about the ViewModel, and how it facilitates designer/developer workflow, jumpstarts development, improves scaling, and makes asynch programming development simpler MMORPG programming in Silverlight Tutorial (12)Map Instance (Part I) Jianqiang Bao has part 12 of his MMORPG game up... this one is showing how to deal with obstuctions on maps. MMORPG programming in Silverlight Tutorial (13)Perfect moving mechanism Jianqiang Bao also has part 13 up, and this second one is about sprite movement around the obstructions. 1 Simple Step for Commanding in Silverlight Christopher Bennage blogged about Commanding in Silverlight, he begins with a blog post about commands in Silverlight 4 then goes on to demonstrate the Caliburn way of doing commanding. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    MIX10

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• Help for choosing a cost effective game server for Flash client

  - by Sapots Thomas

  I am developing a flash-based game primarily for desktops, to be hosted on facebook platform (like cityville, sims social etc). The gameplay doesn't involve real-time communication between players unlike an mmorpg. Here each player plays in his own world without any knowledge of other online players. I've written almost 95% of the game logic in actionscript on the client side. I used Smartfox Server pro on the server side (mostly used for getting data from the DB) and the entire server code is an extension written in java. I'm using json as the protocol for communication. Although I love smartfox server, as an indie, its tough for me to afford the unlimited users license. Morever its limited just to one machine. So I'm looking for an alternative to smartfox server now. The reason for choosing smartfox server earlier was to use the server properties supported by it. Server properties on smartfox server take advantage of the socket connection and are essentially server side objects in java which store some data for the player which he can change frequently during the game. And when he logs out of the game, the extension can write out the final state in the DB (I'm using MySQL). This significantly reduces the number of DB UPDATE/INSERT calls made during the game. I love the way this works since the data is secure as its on the server side and smartfox server is known to be scalable. (although I'm not sure whether this approach is used widely by gaming industry or not, since this is not an mmorpg, I'm putting all player in the lobby). So my question is whether any of the free and community supported servers like reddwarf, firebase, BlazeDS etc can provide a similar architecture so that I can use server properties without many code changes? EDIT : I am not insisting on the exact same feature (thats asking too much!), but atleast a viable messaging system on the server so that I can send actionscript objects from the client using json/binary so that its fast. OR maybe some completely different way to implement what I need here. Thanks in advance.

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• How do you prevent inflation in a virtual economy?

  - by Tetrad

  With your typical MMORPG, players can usually farm the world for raw materials essentially forever. Monsters/mineral veins/etc are usually on some respawn timer so, other than time, there really isn't a good way to limit the amount of new currency entering the system. So that really only leaves money sinks to try to take money out of the system. What are some strategies to prevent inflation of the in-game currency?

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• How do you prevent inflation in a virtual economy?

  - by Tetrad

  With your typical MMORPG, players can usually farm the world for raw materials essentially forever. Monsters/mineral veins/etc are usually on some sort of respawn timer, so other than time there really isn't a good way to limit the amount of new currency entering the system. That really only leaves money sinks to try to take money out of the system. What are some strategies to prevent inflation of the in-game currency?

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• In wow 6.0 expansion, where to buy wow gold?

  - by user50866

  Rs3gold.com is a leading provider of MMORPG virtual currency and other assets around the world, when is the new world of warcraft expansion, you can buy cheapest wow gold from Rs3gold. 8% discount code for your World of Warcraft Gold - RS3GOLD Once your payment on our site is completed successfully, we will deliver your WOW gold instantly within 10-30 minutes! http://www.rs3gold.com/Gold/wow_us.aspx  

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• Any good tutorials or resources for learning how to design a scalable and "component" based game 'fr

  - by CodeJustin.com

  In short I'm creating a 2D mmorpg and unlike my last "mmo" I started developing I want to make sure that this one will scale well and work well when I want to add new in-game features or modify existing ones. With my last attempt with an avatar chat within the first few thousand lines of code and just getting basic features added into the game I seen my code quality lowering and my ability to add new features or modify old ones was getting lower too as I added more features in. It turned into one big mess that some how ran, lol. This time I really need to buckle down and find a design that will allow me to create a game framework that will be easy to add and remove features (aka things like playing mini-games within my world or a mail system or buddy list or a new public area with interactive items). I'm thinking that maybe a component based approach MIGHT be what I'm looking for but I'm really not sure. I have read documents on mmorpg design and 2d game engine architecture but nothing really explained a way of designing a game framework that will basically let me "plug-in" new features into the main game and use the resources of the main game without changing much within my 'main game code'. Hope someone understands what I mean, any help will is appreciated.

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